


Take Care

by joyfulseeker



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Community: cottoncandy_bingo, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-20
Updated: 2012-09-20
Packaged: 2017-11-14 15:59:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/517073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joyfulseeker/pseuds/joyfulseeker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Patrick and a couple of the guys have taken to trading off visiting Johnny on the days he’s kept home from the rink.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take Care

**Author's Note:**

> For the "reading to someone" square on my cotton candy bingo card.

Patrick and a couple of the guys have taken to trading off visiting Johnny on the days he’s kept home from the rink. They work it out in the locker room, quietly, with a sort of forced nonchalance. 

This time, Patrick texts from the car to make sure Johnny has fresh fruit for protein shakes. He hasn’t answered by the time Patrick reaches the turn-off for the supermarket, so he stops and buys anemic-looking strawberries and brown-spotted bananas. Johnny still hasn’t answered by the time he’s parking in one of Johnny’s visitor spaces. He unlocks the door with his key and walks in to find the apartment on light lockdown mode, which is unsurprising but disappointing. All the blinds are drawn in the living room including the blackout curtains, and Johnny is an unmoving lump on one end of the couch, covered with a blanket. His bare foot is sticking out from under the blanket to rest on his ultra-modern, ultra-ugly, ultra-expensive shag carpet.

Patrick tiptoes into the kitchen with his paper bag and starts putting together his smoothie in Johnny’s blender as quietly as possible. He unplugs the entire blender and takes it out onto the balcony, then plugs it into the outlet Johnny claims is for a grill, but that Patrick has only ever seen used once for Christmas lights. There’s an icy wind whipping around the building. By the time the blender has finished chewing its way through the fruit, Patrick is bouncing on his toes and wishing he’d remembered his hat and gloves from the car. He feels a lot of sympathy for the three-year-old frozen collection of dead sticks in the corner that used to be a potted plant. 

When he shoulders the door closed again, the lump on the couch is stirring.

“Kaner?” Johnny mumbles.

“Hey,” Patrick says. He drops the blender off on the pass-through counter and walks over. Johnny’s hair is greasy and sticking to his forehead, poking up in the back where he’s been sleeping on it all day. “I’m here to steal all your shit. It’s really fucking cold on your balcony, if you were wondering.”

“Why were you outside?” Johnny yawns, and makes a weird reaching gesture with his hand. Patrick walks closer until he’s standing over him, and Johnny grabs Patrick’s left hand and puts it on his forehead, partly covering his eyes. Patrick can feel Johnny’s eyelids twitch against the side of his hand. Johnny’s face feels staggeringly warm against his cold skin. Patrick runs the fingers of his right hand under the matted hair on Johnny’s forehead, smoothing it away, then over the back of his head, but his hair is pretty fucked up so he gives up.

“It seemed like it’d be quieter,” Patrick says.

Johnny grunts dismissively, then says, “How was practice?”

“Fine,” Patrick says. It’s roughly true. Good enough but not great might be more honest, but Patrick doesn’t want to give Johnny more motivation to get back too early. “I was texting you all day, lazy.”

Johnny’s eyes make some sort of motion Patrick would swear would be an eye-roll if he had his eyes open. “I’m screening my calls.”

“Psh. You’re not popular enough for that.” Patrick takes his hand away now that his skin’s thawed back to room temperature and backs up to get his smoothie. When he comes back, Johnny has tucked his feet back up under the blanket, so Patrick sits in the adjacent armchair and puts his legs up on Johnny’s shiny sharp-angled coffee table. He sips meditatively and thinks about practice and their upcoming games. It’s easier to think about this stuff in this dim room with Johnny nearby, reminding him with every overly noisy breath that the situation, while shitty, is probably temporary.

“So how is it today,” Patrick asks eventually.

Johnny sighs. “Bad. I’m fucking bored, Kaner. I never thought I’d ever get tired of sleeping.”

Patrick can’t actually imagine it, right now. Not at this point in the season. He feels like he could sleep anywhere, given half a chance, his body constantly fighting to regain its strength from the beginning of the season. “Yeah,” he says anyway. He thinks through the options, but the light sensitivity doesn’t leave much. Videogames are out, as well as computer monitors, movies, and books. Well, reading books, anyway. He remembers taking a road trip once with his dad where his dad played an audiobook the whole way. That might work, but only if Tazer is really desperate. Johnny huffs out another breath, which is a little too close to sighing on his couch in his darkened living room. Johnny is clearly pretty desperate.

“I could read to you,” Patrick says eventually, and just leaves the sentence hanging awkwardly while he finishes his smoothie and takes it back to the sink to rinse the glass. He cleans up the blender, knife, and cutting board and refills Johnny’s water glass.

“You need a migraine pill?” he asks.

“No,” Johnny says flatly. After a few seconds he relents and says, “I took one a couple hours ago.” After another couple seconds, he says, “What are you reading?”

Patrick grins as he heads to his bag, but gets it under control by the time he turns back around. He sits back down in the armchair and thumbs his iPad on, tilting the screen away from Johnny.

“Well, let’s see,” he says. “Uh, I’ve got Alice in Wonderland, I was reading that to my cousin last time I was in Buffalo.” 

“No,” Johnny says.

“Harry Potter?” Patrick says.

“ _No_ ,” Johnny says.

“What’s wrong with Harry Potter, it’s great, get you out of your head in no time.”

“I’ve already seen the movies,” Johnny says, disgruntled.

“Wee Free Men,” Patrick says. “It’s by this other British author, it’s, uh, you’ll like it. I think. I’m only a couple chapters in.”

“Fine,” Johnny says.

It’s actually really slow reading aloud. Patrick hadn’t thought about it, but it takes forever to finish a page. There are a lot of words and phrases he finds himself stumbling on, intonations he doesn’t get right. Some of the dialogue is a lot weirder to say than to read. After three pages, he finds himself feeling more sympathy for his parents, who had dutifully marched through the entirety of The Hobbit for him and his sisters when he was eight. Johnny starts out shifting around a lot on the couch, but gradually quiets down, and Patrick finds himself getting kind of into it. His voice sounds different when he’s reading aloud. It takes all his concentration, too, which is nice. And he’s doing something nice for Johnny, which is also kind of nice. He can already tell this reading aloud thing is never going to be mentioned in front of other people, though. He stops at the end of the chapter, waiting to see if Johnny stirs, but his breathing has fallen into sleeping-Tazer rhythms. It’s probably partly the migraine pills, but Patrick feels a little proud of himself anyway. 

The darkness of the room is starting to make Patrick feel sleepy, too, like pre-game naps in their hotel room during away games. He sighs and turns the iPad off. Johnny’s armchair is terrible for sleeping, and if he’s going to get a nap in he’s got to be moving on. The blanket is slipping down to the floor, so Patrick pulls it back up to cover Johnny’s shoulders, then stays for a long moment, looking down at Johnny’s sleeping face. He doesn’t look relaxed at all. He’s frowning in his sleep like he’s studying a play diagram, like if he memorizes the right sequence of moves he’ll make the points happen. 

Patrick ghosts his hand over the crown of Johnny’s head. “Okay,” he says under his breath. Okay.

He packs the iPad away into his bag again and leaves, locking the door behind him. In the elevator on the way back down to the car, he texts, _you fell asleep at the good part. i’ll read it to you next time._

Two hours later he wakes up to find that Tazer has texted him back, _did that book have small blue people in it._

_If you cant remember you have to reread._

_whatever,_ Johnny texts. Then, _good game. You can tell me about the blue people later._


End file.
